Yeah I was wondering this as well. Using 'intitial cooperation' as a starting point, you could technically call answering the border patrols request to step aside so we can rifle through your belongings to be cooperation.
If I'm aiming the phone straight up in the air, can it tell if I've lowered the phone much closer to the ground? And that there is reduced light where I'm aiming? Just curious.
Although on the plus side, when you're busted, without touching anything you can bring the phone up as you would be normally talking and go "Look, it's in phone mode, don't know what you're talking about. Nice dress."
Unfortunately all that is filtered by each person as they look at it... We see the evidence of God, you would see Luck.
Wow, you just get better and better. Unfortunately? It's not unfortunate, it's close to proof that there isn't actually a god and people that have fortunate events happen to them that were out of their control attribute it to a god because they feel more comfortable than the harsh realisation that the universe decided that it wouldn't kill them... yet.
Two houses sit next to each other near an airfield. A out of control plane hits the second house, killing all but one member of the family inside. The family in the first house spend the rest of the week praising god and the rest of their lives preaching his glory to all. The remaining member of the second family spends the rest of his week mourning and there rest of his life questioning god to himself.
See also : the pilot of the plane and their family. Pilot dies/God questioned Pilot lives/God praised delete as applicable.
"through patterns in chaos. People looking through history (either global, national, or personal) can find patterns that show either an intelligence manipulating the events or an incredible string of luck and coincidence."
Good news everyone! We've discovered god! Turns out it was just confirmation bias under another name.
You know what, I totally agree with you here, even down to purchasing games and then getting the crack to avoid the DRM, and on that note I really wish that people cracking games would keep the crack seperate because I really don't want to download an image of a 4 gig game I already own simply so I can crack it.
In a perfect world, This should have been the start of your entire post. There would be no pirating games, there would be no "pirated" verison, DRM would be realised to be mostly useless. My original post was nothing more than an empty plead to a non-existent perfect world, wishing that the spark that started this downward spiral had never occured.
Your wish to express to publishers that you won't buy their game with DRM is a very valid one. DRM might have contributed to some people not buying games, but that sort of effect is not an observable one. And by this I don't mean that it's too small, but that there is simply no way of measuring the impact this has had on sales. The problem is that there is only two vaguely measurable values when it comes to software production: the amount of people that purchased it is obviously pretty easy to discover through sales numbers, and the amount of people that pirated it by observing torrent values. And the problem is that with only these two actual numbers to work with, any reduction of sales is placed on the other only number to hand.
It just frustrates me when people don't appreciate that this vicious circle of piracy->DRM->piracy->heavierDRM etc had to start somewhere, and it wasn't anti-piracy measures being created out of thin air when no one was copying anything. And the moronic justification of piracy, that's pretty damn annoying as well. People claim that no demo is a valid reason to pirate and then in the majority of cases never buy the game even if they did like their 'demo', and then they'll jump online to bitch about the latest implementation of intrusive DRM. Yes, DRM is bad, yes, it doesn't help block piracy as much as they think and it does affect legit users much more than it affects pirates, but it wasn't just thought up of out of thin air one morning when publishers were deciding how to best screw over paying customers.
I hate DRM as much as the rest of us. I recently stopped using Steam, I haven't installed the SE of Sacred 2 I was so excited to get in the mail because I discovered it has incredibly bad DRM, I tolerated Far Cry 2 purely because, well actually I don't know why I did but it's too late now because it's installed. To date, I haven't purchased GTA4 on PC because of it.
It just frustrates me when people don't appreciate that this vicious circle of piracy->DRM->piracy->heavierDRM etc had to start somewhere, and it wasn't anti-piracy measures being created out of thin air when no one was copying anything. And the moronic justification of piracy, that's pretty damn annoying as well.
What do sales have to do with anything? Sales can be great, but if it can be seen that people are still copying the hell out of stuff, these sort of measures will inevitably be implemented. Sales, good or bad or otherwise aren't a factor in this; a point you've (inadvertently?) made yourself. If the publishers can see that people are getting their product without paying for it they will take steps to stop that regardless of how much money they are making the first place.
Region encoding should be illegal. It's disguistingly blatant way to control distribution and increase profits at the cost of the consumer, which is why circumvention of it is legal in Australia (see : PS2 modchips), and it was a clear money grab, one that obviously happened without any sort of prompting.
Copy protection is a different issue though. Games were published, games got copied, publishers implemented DRM. Simple as that. Sales are irrelevant to this process, and I don't see how an argument can be made that DRM would have been implemented if piracy was rampant like the current situation, because it doesn't provide distribution control and/or artifical profit increase, it's simply an intrusive, flawed, unpopular way of attempting to make people pay for what they should be paying for.
The solution some people amazingly seem to think is sound logic, cracking it and pirating the game anyway, isn't going to do anything but make it worse, simply because that's how we got here in the first place.
Build a time machine, send all us gamers back fifteen years, and make all these goddamn idiots stop fucking copying every single fucking release that came out so piracy never becomes a problem that, in the minds of the publishers, it warrants such horribly intrusive anti-piracy measures in the first place. Seriously, this was brought on ourselves, and while the Securom solution is inelegant, ineffective and outright unacceptable, when you've got thousands of people sitting on major torrents for every new game release, the publishers start to get more and more restrictive in an attempt to stop this shit.
Oh, for a time when cd-checks were the worst you would encounter.
(Oh, and remove all region encoding as well. My god that stuff shits me.)
The Civ games have DRM? I thought they just had cd checks. Unless you're counting a simple "Do you have an original disc?" check when starting the game as DRM, which is surely not the problem.
DRM is Securom, it's Starforce, it's Steam. It's calling home everytime or during install or whenever the system decides that it doesn't trust you anymore.
You're seriously bitching about cd-checks? Oh my fucking god, to go back to a time when cd-checks were the height of anti-piracy measures.
Oh wait, you're already on O points because this is completely fucking stupid. I'm going to post anyway just to make myself feel better.
Hi, this an awesome post, and I accidentally modded it Overrated instead of Funny, so here I am to tell you that it's funny, which will also remove the mod.
Yeah, there is a somewhat similar story/legend about a serial killer who found his victims out in rural Australia, backpackers and travellers and the type.
He was the subject of a massive manhunt and apparently the story goes that he was found somewhere, was on the run from the police out in the middle of nowhere (there is a lot of that in Australia), and eventually was cornered, and with nowhere to go, got out of his vehicle, dropped his weapon and with his hands in the air and called out his surrender.
Given that the only people around were chasing police and they were in the middle of nowhere, the police response was basically "you have to be joking", and the official report was that he was cornered and killed in a shoot out.
Part of why I mentioned the pomato is that the potato and tomato are both members of the same genus, Solanum [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. the deadly nightshade family.
Does any of this have anything to do with the fact that at Expert Alchemy, potatoes and tomatoes suddenly gain Damage Health stats? Cause, you know, there is that vampire cave outside of Skingrad that I really want to clear out.
This is the most insightful comment I've read releated to this, and I don't have mod points at the moment so I have to simply post this pointless comment in agreeance with you.
What you're describing, that sense of being in the environment and letting the environment kind of drive the experience, is a function of us building that foundation. We needed to build an infrastructure, a framework for supporting the player moving around the world kind of at his own will and using whatever resources he wants -- whether it's vehicles, boats, on foot, or what have you.
What the hell game is he talking about? The travel system they've implemented somehow creates all these magical stories out of nowhere?. The environment is basically empty outside of about three different types of checkpoints and maybe two types of safe houses. And nothing ever happens in the game without your influence. And even then, you don't actually have influence, basically you turn up somewhere, and people shoot at you. You run into people in cars who shoot before even getting a chance to identify you, or, you approach a checkpoint, and you will get shot at by before they even get a chance to identify you. All the main missions involve shooting guys that are in between you and the other thing you have to shoot, and every single assassination mission and gun running mission, which are the only two types of side mission, are the same. You shoot a truck or a person, either of which are running tight circles. It would have been interesting to see this endless repetition and respawning addressed.
They hear there are factions in the game -- that immediately implies a different kind of dynamic, right? They're like, "Oh, why is everyone shooting at me?" [laughs] Well, it's still a first-person shooter.
As if somehow the two are mutually exclusive? The reason that people question this is because yes, the inclusion of factions does imply a different kind of dynamic. But it's completely ignored; in every. fucking. mission. you are told that you are working on the sly and that even the guys who you are working "with" will shoot you because they don't know you. But it's all a moot point, because for the vast majority of the game YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON THAT ANYONE EVER SHOOTS AT. There are factions? You could have fooled me, I've never seen two people from opposing factions run into each other and start a fire fight. I've never seen someone from faction A approach a checkpoint of faction B and get shot at. I find it hard to believe there is even faction related code in the game so far. Either that or no faction member has ever encountered It's given lip service in the intro, and mentioned by the mission descriptions, which are little more than first person, in engine cut-scenes.
I like to question some design elements. Why can't I run while reloading? Or at least interrupt the reload by running so I can reload again when safer. Why can't you interrupt the animation to yank out a bullet? The most frustrating way to die is to stand stock still and start pulling out a bullet only to realize you aren't quite as covered as you thought and then hammering everything trying to move away to cover.
In early discussions the game was touted as being in specific development for PC. Yet while you can save anywhere in the PC version, the little save boxes that are console-specific are still there. The field of view was the console style nose-against-the-screen crap that makes it hard to play for PC snobs. There was no out of the box widescreen support, why is this still happenning? Why does the game have a seemingly endless supply of mercenaries that are restocked magically every 5 minutes, yet approximately 14 zebras for the entire world? Did they ever consider implementing dangerous animals? Anything at all interesting outside of empty savannah?
He is right though, the game is a first person shooter. Of the most generic kind. It's just that they spread the limited variation of the design incredibly lightly over a large, primarily empty game, gave the impression that it was going to be an interesting adventure, and then made every one simply shoot at you.
It's a Far Cry from a classic (boom tish), and given the brilliance of the first game (ending area of that game aside), it honestly didn't deserve the Far Cry name.
Steam won't let me play the games I want to because it can't find the online server to authenticate the games that I claim to own. Maybe not directly DRM but what is happening is an end result of an implementation of DRM. If we use the same situation but say that we are using Impulse, i.e. the games have no per-play DRM, or rather can't only be launched through a DRM platform (a fine line), all that I would be blocked from doing is buying new games, not playing the games I already "own". So to say that it has nothing to do with DRM sounds like maybe you haven't thought it through. Don't feel bad, one day, through reasons beyond your control, you'll be blocked from the Steam purchases you've made, and you'll realize your mistake.
I'm not going to argue with free market theory because I don't know it, but I knew Steam was like this, yet I was still a strong supporter, although I have to admit in the back of my mind I did miss manuals and discs (but maybe not cd-checks). I bought stuff anyway, supported it from early on, then I inevitably got caught out and I've had a hard wake up call to what I'm really dealing with here. A questionable DRM platform that insultingly assumes I should have to confirm the legality of every purchase I make each time I wish to play them.
A tick box to say that I can play in offline mode for a while isn't an acceptable way of doing things, and the fact that I hadn't selected the right option and was locked out makes me wonder what might happen if that option doesn't work, or if the length of time of offline mode being valid runs out when I happen to lose internet again for whatever reason. Either way it's unacceptable that I be at the mercy of their servers or my internet connection to play games I had apparently already purchased.
I'm adding a further sale to hard copies for the games I like and no longer contributing to Steam purchases in any way from now on. The only DRM in all the games I've purchased in this way was Steam based only, as far as I'm aware. Yes I'm paying twice for a game but the point you're missing is that I still want to play the games. Yes there will be some games that I regret purchasing that I won't be rebuying, but I want the games I "purchased" off Steam in my collection, I just don't want the Steam versions, because, quite frankly, it's become pretty obvious that "purchasing" isn't really what I'm doing here. The big problem will be GRID, all the other games are going to be easy to replace at budget title prices.
Yeah Impulse doesn't appear to be much better, although you don't need to be online or in offline mode just to play the damn game, only to install it. And patch it, which I think is the catch.
I've tried two Gamersgate games, and one was horrendously bad (Knights of the Temple 2) and one blue screens without fail as soon as I enter combat (Parkan 2, 30 seconds into the tutorial), and I'm afraid to get any more as their support is non existent from what I can tell (404s everywhere) and the ability to review games was broken as of about a week ago (haven't tried since), and they've just replaced their Impulse style install/downloader with a pure "download your setup files here and be done with it". As to what DRM is included from there, I don't know.
Good Old Games is brilliant. At the moment my GOG account has 41 games attached to it.
It's only the launcher that runs a disc check; the actual game itself just runs if you start from the game executable or change the desktop icon to point to that instead. This may only be because I've connected it to my Games For Windows account, so your mileage may vary.
Why didn't you just contact Steam technical support?
Yeah, I'm basically paying twice for my mistake, and because of DRM, but hey, this is why DRM sucks. It's not that much different from Far Cry 2 hitting 5 unique installs and telling you that you can't install it anymore, except there is no workaround when I have no internet connection.
What are Steam tech support going to do for me over the phone when I don't have an internet connection? Provide me with a way to force Steam into Offline mode when it doesn't want to, i.e. a way of avoiding the DRM? Unlikely.
To be honest, the entire experience was a wake up call, and as I said, I'm in the process of reverting my mistaken Steam purchases into disc copies, at which point I'll probably remove Steam altogether and be done with it. If it ever becomes so big that a game can only be purchased on Steam, then I suppose I'll have to give in. But when that happens, the DRM has won, and it will be too late anyway.
Ah, is that if you purchase the DLC online instead of getting it in disc format? Because I have the Knights of the Nine disc and The Shivering Isles and I'm not aware of any authentication.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah I was wondering this as well. Using 'intitial cooperation' as a starting point, you could technically call answering the border patrols request to step aside so we can rifle through your belongings to be cooperation.
I think I just worked out what the number in your username stands for. You know you're not going to be able to change that in a year, right?
(Why do I have this feeling that if I were to go create a new user account the id would be 1463820.)
Yo momma so fat I had to entangle with her to actually get any action.
If I'm aiming the phone straight up in the air, can it tell if I've lowered the phone much closer to the ground? And that there is reduced light where I'm aiming? Just curious.
Although on the plus side, when you're busted, without touching anything you can bring the phone up as you would be normally talking and go "Look, it's in phone mode, don't know what you're talking about. Nice dress."
Unfortunately all that is filtered by each person as they look at it ... We see the evidence of God, you would see Luck.
Wow, you just get better and better. Unfortunately? It's not unfortunate, it's close to proof that there isn't actually a god and people that have fortunate events happen to them that were out of their control attribute it to a god because they feel more comfortable than the harsh realisation that the universe decided that it wouldn't kill them ... yet.
Two houses sit next to each other near an airfield. A out of control plane hits the second house, killing all but one member of the family inside. The family in the first house spend the rest of the week praising god and the rest of their lives preaching his glory to all. The remaining member of the second family spends the rest of his week mourning and there rest of his life questioning god to himself.
See also : the pilot of the plane and their family. Pilot dies/God questioned Pilot lives/God praised delete as applicable.
"through patterns in chaos. People looking through history (either global, national, or personal) can find patterns that show either an intelligence manipulating the events or an incredible string of luck and coincidence."
Good news everyone! We've discovered god! Turns out it was just confirmation bias under another name.
Hahahaha copy and paste and then forget to remove the original copy? Good work
You know what, I totally agree with you here, even down to purchasing games and then getting the crack to avoid the DRM, and on that note I really wish that people cracking games would keep the crack seperate because I really don't want to download an image of a 4 gig game I already own simply so I can crack it.
In a perfect world,
This should have been the start of your entire post. There would be no pirating games, there would be no "pirated" verison, DRM would be realised to be mostly useless. My original post was nothing more than an empty plead to a non-existent perfect world, wishing that the spark that started this downward spiral had never occured.
Your wish to express to publishers that you won't buy their game with DRM is a very valid one. DRM might have contributed to some people not buying games, but that sort of effect is not an observable one. And by this I don't mean that it's too small, but that there is simply no way of measuring the impact this has had on sales. The problem is that there is only two vaguely measurable values when it comes to software production: the amount of people that purchased it is obviously pretty easy to discover through sales numbers, and the amount of people that pirated it by observing torrent values. And the problem is that with only these two actual numbers to work with, any reduction of sales is placed on the other only number to hand.
It just frustrates me when people don't appreciate that this vicious circle of piracy->DRM->piracy->heavierDRM etc had to start somewhere, and it wasn't anti-piracy measures being created out of thin air when no one was copying anything. And the moronic justification of piracy, that's pretty damn annoying as well. People claim that no demo is a valid reason to pirate and then in the majority of cases never buy the game even if they did like their 'demo', and then they'll jump online to bitch about the latest implementation of intrusive DRM. Yes, DRM is bad, yes, it doesn't help block piracy as much as they think and it does affect legit users much more than it affects pirates, but it wasn't just thought up of out of thin air one morning when publishers were deciding how to best screw over paying customers.
I hate DRM as much as the rest of us. I recently stopped using Steam, I haven't installed the SE of Sacred 2 I was so excited to get in the mail because I discovered it has incredibly bad DRM, I tolerated Far Cry 2 purely because, well actually I don't know why I did but it's too late now because it's installed. To date, I haven't purchased GTA4 on PC because of it.
It just frustrates me when people don't appreciate that this vicious circle of piracy->DRM->piracy->heavierDRM etc had to start somewhere, and it wasn't anti-piracy measures being created out of thin air when no one was copying anything. And the moronic justification of piracy, that's pretty damn annoying as well.
What do sales have to do with anything? Sales can be great, but if it can be seen that people are still copying the hell out of stuff, these sort of measures will inevitably be implemented. Sales, good or bad or otherwise aren't a factor in this; a point you've (inadvertently?) made yourself. If the publishers can see that people are getting their product without paying for it they will take steps to stop that regardless of how much money they are making the first place.
Region encoding should be illegal. It's disguistingly blatant way to control distribution and increase profits at the cost of the consumer, which is why circumvention of it is legal in Australia (see : PS2 modchips), and it was a clear money grab, one that obviously happened without any sort of prompting.
Copy protection is a different issue though. Games were published, games got copied, publishers implemented DRM. Simple as that. Sales are irrelevant to this process, and I don't see how an argument can be made that DRM would have been implemented if piracy was rampant like the current situation, because it doesn't provide distribution control and/or artifical profit increase, it's simply an intrusive, flawed, unpopular way of attempting to make people pay for what they should be paying for.
The solution some people amazingly seem to think is sound logic, cracking it and pirating the game anyway, isn't going to do anything but make it worse, simply because that's how we got here in the first place.
Build a time machine, send all us gamers back fifteen years, and make all these goddamn idiots stop fucking copying every single fucking release that came out so piracy never becomes a problem that, in the minds of the publishers, it warrants such horribly intrusive anti-piracy measures in the first place. Seriously, this was brought on ourselves, and while the Securom solution is inelegant, ineffective and outright unacceptable, when you've got thousands of people sitting on major torrents for every new game release, the publishers start to get more and more restrictive in an attempt to stop this shit.
Oh, for a time when cd-checks were the worst you would encounter.
(Oh, and remove all region encoding as well. My god that stuff shits me.)
I don't see a problem implementing any of this.
The Civ games have DRM? I thought they just had cd checks. Unless you're counting a simple "Do you have an original disc?" check when starting the game as DRM, which is surely not the problem.
DRM is Securom, it's Starforce, it's Steam. It's calling home everytime or during install or whenever the system decides that it doesn't trust you anymore.
You're seriously bitching about cd-checks? Oh my fucking god, to go back to a time when cd-checks were the height of anti-piracy measures.
Oh wait, you're already on O points because this is completely fucking stupid. I'm going to post anyway just to make myself feel better.
shut up and ion my shirt
Hi, this an awesome post, and I accidentally modded it Overrated instead of Funny, so here I am to tell you that it's funny, which will also remove the mod.
Two birds, one stone, bitches.
Yeah, there is a somewhat similar story/legend about a serial killer who found his victims out in rural Australia, backpackers and travellers and the type.
He was the subject of a massive manhunt and apparently the story goes that he was found somewhere, was on the run from the police out in the middle of nowhere (there is a lot of that in Australia), and eventually was cornered, and with nowhere to go, got out of his vehicle, dropped his weapon and with his hands in the air and called out his surrender.
Given that the only people around were chasing police and they were in the middle of nowhere, the police response was basically "you have to be joking", and the official report was that he was cornered and killed in a shoot out.
Part of why I mentioned the pomato is that the potato and tomato are both members of the same genus, Solanum [wikipedia.org], a.k.a. the deadly nightshade family.
Does any of this have anything to do with the fact that at Expert Alchemy, potatoes and tomatoes suddenly gain Damage Health stats? Cause, you know, there is that vampire cave outside of Skingrad that I really want to clear out.
He means that he's not homogenised. Him? Homogenised? No way, he likes the ladies.
(Moo. Are you happy now?)
This is the most insightful comment I've read releated to this, and I don't have mod points at the moment so I have to simply post this pointless comment in agreeance with you.
Oops.
Either that or no faction member has ever encountered any other faction member for the entire game so far as I've played it.
From Page 1 :
What you're describing, that sense of being in the environment and letting the environment kind of drive the experience, is a function of us building that foundation. We needed to build an infrastructure, a framework for supporting the player moving around the world kind of at his own will and using whatever resources he wants -- whether it's vehicles, boats, on foot, or what have you.
What the hell game is he talking about? The travel system they've implemented somehow creates all these magical stories out of nowhere?. The environment is basically empty outside of about three different types of checkpoints and maybe two types of safe houses. And nothing ever happens in the game without your influence. And even then, you don't actually have influence, basically you turn up somewhere, and people shoot at you. You run into people in cars who shoot before even getting a chance to identify you, or, you approach a checkpoint, and you will get shot at by before they even get a chance to identify you. All the main missions involve shooting guys that are in between you and the other thing you have to shoot, and every single assassination mission and gun running mission, which are the only two types of side mission, are the same. You shoot a truck or a person, either of which are running tight circles. It would have been interesting to see this endless repetition and respawning addressed.
They hear there are factions in the game -- that immediately implies a different kind of dynamic, right? They're like, "Oh, why is everyone shooting at me?" [laughs] Well, it's still a first-person shooter.
As if somehow the two are mutually exclusive? The reason that people question this is because yes, the inclusion of factions does imply a different kind of dynamic. But it's completely ignored; in every. fucking. mission. you are told that you are working on the sly and that even the guys who you are working "with" will shoot you because they don't know you. But it's all a moot point, because for the vast majority of the game YOU ARE THE ONLY PERSON THAT ANYONE EVER SHOOTS AT. There are factions? You could have fooled me, I've never seen two people from opposing factions run into each other and start a fire fight. I've never seen someone from faction A approach a checkpoint of faction B and get shot at. I find it hard to believe there is even faction related code in the game so far. Either that or no faction member has ever encountered It's given lip service in the intro, and mentioned by the mission descriptions, which are little more than first person, in engine cut-scenes.
I like to question some design elements. Why can't I run while reloading? Or at least interrupt the reload by running so I can reload again when safer. Why can't you interrupt the animation to yank out a bullet? The most frustrating way to die is to stand stock still and start pulling out a bullet only to realize you aren't quite as covered as you thought and then hammering everything trying to move away to cover.
In early discussions the game was touted as being in specific development for PC. Yet while you can save anywhere in the PC version, the little save boxes that are console-specific are still there. The field of view was the console style nose-against-the-screen crap that makes it hard to play for PC snobs. There was no out of the box widescreen support, why is this still happenning? Why does the game have a seemingly endless supply of mercenaries that are restocked magically every 5 minutes, yet approximately 14 zebras for the entire world? Did they ever consider implementing dangerous animals? Anything at all interesting outside of empty savannah?
He is right though, the game is a first person shooter. Of the most generic kind. It's just that they spread the limited variation of the design incredibly lightly over a large, primarily empty game, gave the impression that it was going to be an interesting adventure, and then made every one simply shoot at you.
It's a Far Cry from a classic (boom tish), and given the brilliance of the first game (ending area of that game aside), it honestly didn't deserve the Far Cry name.
Steam won't let me play the games I want to because it can't find the online server to authenticate the games that I claim to own. Maybe not directly DRM but what is happening is an end result of an implementation of DRM. If we use the same situation but say that we are using Impulse, i.e. the games have no per-play DRM, or rather can't only be launched through a DRM platform (a fine line), all that I would be blocked from doing is buying new games, not playing the games I already "own". So to say that it has nothing to do with DRM sounds like maybe you haven't thought it through. Don't feel bad, one day, through reasons beyond your control, you'll be blocked from the Steam purchases you've made, and you'll realize your mistake.
I'm not going to argue with free market theory because I don't know it, but I knew Steam was like this, yet I was still a strong supporter, although I have to admit in the back of my mind I did miss manuals and discs (but maybe not cd-checks). I bought stuff anyway, supported it from early on, then I inevitably got caught out and I've had a hard wake up call to what I'm really dealing with here. A questionable DRM platform that insultingly assumes I should have to confirm the legality of every purchase I make each time I wish to play them.
A tick box to say that I can play in offline mode for a while isn't an acceptable way of doing things, and the fact that I hadn't selected the right option and was locked out makes me wonder what might happen if that option doesn't work, or if the length of time of offline mode being valid runs out when I happen to lose internet again for whatever reason. Either way it's unacceptable that I be at the mercy of their servers or my internet connection to play games I had apparently already purchased.
I'm adding a further sale to hard copies for the games I like and no longer contributing to Steam purchases in any way from now on. The only DRM in all the games I've purchased in this way was Steam based only, as far as I'm aware. Yes I'm paying twice for a game but the point you're missing is that I still want to play the games. Yes there will be some games that I regret purchasing that I won't be rebuying, but I want the games I "purchased" off Steam in my collection, I just don't want the Steam versions, because, quite frankly, it's become pretty obvious that "purchasing" isn't really what I'm doing here. The big problem will be GRID, all the other games are going to be easy to replace at budget title prices.
Yeah Impulse doesn't appear to be much better, although you don't need to be online or in offline mode just to play the damn game, only to install it. And patch it, which I think is the catch.
I've tried two Gamersgate games, and one was horrendously bad (Knights of the Temple 2) and one blue screens without fail as soon as I enter combat (Parkan 2, 30 seconds into the tutorial), and I'm afraid to get any more as their support is non existent from what I can tell (404s everywhere) and the ability to review games was broken as of about a week ago (haven't tried since), and they've just replaced their Impulse style install/downloader with a pure "download your setup files here and be done with it". As to what DRM is included from there, I don't know.
Good Old Games is brilliant. At the moment my GOG account has 41 games attached to it.
It's only the launcher that runs a disc check; the actual game itself just runs if you start from the game executable or change the desktop icon to point to that instead. This may only be because I've connected it to my Games For Windows account, so your mileage may vary.
Why didn't you just contact Steam technical support?
Yeah, I'm basically paying twice for my mistake, and because of DRM, but hey, this is why DRM sucks. It's not that much different from Far Cry 2 hitting 5 unique installs and telling you that you can't install it anymore, except there is no workaround when I have no internet connection.
What are Steam tech support going to do for me over the phone when I don't have an internet connection? Provide me with a way to force Steam into Offline mode when it doesn't want to, i.e. a way of avoiding the DRM? Unlikely.
To be honest, the entire experience was a wake up call, and as I said, I'm in the process of reverting my mistaken Steam purchases into disc copies, at which point I'll probably remove Steam altogether and be done with it. If it ever becomes so big that a game can only be purchased on Steam, then I suppose I'll have to give in. But when that happens, the DRM has won, and it will be too late anyway.
Ah, is that if you purchase the DLC online instead of getting it in disc format? Because I have the Knights of the Nine disc and The Shivering Isles and I'm not aware of any authentication.